Linux: Losing Bugs In Warnings

Jeff Garzik suggested that more recent versions of GCC have been getting more and more verbose, "the level of warnings in a kernel build has lately increased to the point where it is hiding bugs and otherwise making life difficult."

He started a new "gccbug" branch in which he's been silencing bogus warning after verifying that they are indeed bogus, "the audit has already uncovered several minor bugs, lending credence to my theory that too many warnings hides bugs." Daniel Walker pointed to an earlier posting [story] in which a macro was created to handle false positives. He summarized concerns raised in the earlier discussion, "it's not about anyone not reviewing the code properly when the warning is first silenced. It's that future changes might create new problems that are also silenced. I don't think it's a huge concern, especially since there's was a config option to turn the warning backs on."